Tainted drugs may still be in system, state says

KEN THOMASAssociated Press Writer

Published Wednesday, July 23, 2003

MIAMI -- Patients battling AIDS and cancer face a small risk of getting counterfeit drugs at their local pharmacies despite efforts by state investigators to safeguard supplies while they pursue wholesalers who are peddling bogus medications.

Concerns about the safety of the drug supply surfaced after prosecutors announced Monday that a grand jury had indicted 19 people on charges of watering down or selling fake prescription drugs to businesses that supplied corner drug stores and retail chains. The drugs were often prescribed for AIDS and cancer patients.

Pharmacies and drug stores, meanwhile, assured pharmacists and patients that their medication was safe and cited safeguards already in place to prevent faulty drugs from reaching the public.

Officials with Walgreen Co. and Eckerd Corp., two of the nation's biggest retail drug chains, said their pharmacists had fielded some calls Tuesday from patients concerned about their medications.

But the companies said that the tainted medications did not find their way into their stores. They stressed that the vast majority of their medication is supplied directly from manufacturers and any distributors or wholesalers supplying the company's pharmacies are fully vetted.

"We went back and did a very thorough search through all of our pharmacies and records to ensure that we did not have any of this counterfeit medication in our system," said Walgreen's spokesman Michael Polzin. "And all of the reports that we got back from the field were clean."

John Sensabaugh, an Eckerd spokesman, said the company did not buy the drugs from any of the individuals or businesses named in the indictment. While 85 to 90 percent of the company's drug supply comes from the manufacturer, he said Eckerd would terminate its business with any wholesaler that supplied it with tainted medications.

"We go through a very lengthy process to make sure that the drugs that come into our supply are safe," Sensabaugh said.

Michael Mann, chief of investigations for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said Tuesday that authorities "have not uncovered counterfeit drugs" at large chains but there was no way to be completely sure that all the compromised medication had been seized from the network of distributors, wholesalers and secondary wholesalers who supply drugs in Florida.

"I know through the course of this investigation that tainted drugs are out there on the market someplace," Mann said. "I think it's an extremely small percentage but even a small percentage is too much."

Mann said investigators had seized $18 million worth of tainted drugs during the investigation -- in one particular sting, authorities bought $500,000 worth of counterfeit drugs to get it out of the system. He said any tainted drugs were immediately seized once they were discovered.

"Everytime we identified drugs that were adulterated or counterfeited we immediately removed them from the mainstream. Even at the expense of our investigation, we weren't about to allow tainted or adulterated drugs to get to one patient," Mann said.

Dr. Margaret Fischl, director of the AIDS Clinical Research Unit at the University of Miami School of Medicine, said her office planned to discuss the case with patients in the coming days. She said the faulty medications could drastically affect their health, forcing unwarranted changes in their treatment or unnecessary procedures.

"You could be doing tests that are absolutely not necessary. You could be exposing patients to other interventions that are not needed," Fischl said. "To me ... you're playing with people's well-beings and their lives."